Goibibo launches ‘Flight Advice’ for International flights

Goibibo.com, a leading online travel site launched Flight Advice – a recommendation engine for international flights. Consumers are mostly overloaded with choices in terms of travel options. And there are more than 300 flight combinations which one has to go through to pick one that works best. Flight Advice aims to resolve this problem. “Through customer track programme we observed that for international travel, fare is not the only criteria for users while selecting an option. There are couple of other points as well - duration of flights, number of stops, cancellation policy, etc,” explains Sanjay Bhasin, MD, Goibibo.com.

Flight Advice eliminates the problem of going through a plethora of options, which ensures that the chances of choosing the best flight option are high. Flight Advice when toggled on will understand from the search query of the user and then arranges flight combination based on relevancy and least agony, thus reducing time to dig around the best possible flight options. Flight Advice can reduce time considerably and in according to Sanjay, in an ideal scenario a user would spend at-least 50-60% less time in identifying the best option for given sector and date. “This will also ensure that the user is getting flight which is best value for money out of all the recommendations,” says Sanjay.

According to Sanjay, Goibibo.com has been growing in triple digits year-on-year for the last three years. South East Asia and Middle East routes are most booked mostly on the site, which Sanjay attributes to good fares, number of stops and cancellation policy offered by Goibibo.com

Flight Advice is a backend algorithmic development which mines and understands from the facets of flights. It has been developed as a lab product, to feature on Goibibo’s our bigger recommendation platform. The feature took a month’s time to develop and was made available for user trials for 2-3 weeks to understand the relevancy of recommendations. It is currently in its beta stage. “The product is the 1^st version and will further evolve as an ongoing activity while we learn more from the data and various other features which come out of flight/search queries. The aim is to be even more crisper,” says Sanjay.

While there are no fixed revenues targets set from Flight Advice, Sanjay says the feature is aimed at improving the conversion rates of transactions on Goibibo which will in-turn reflect in better revenue lines.